Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
She shrieked, dropped the candle, and the only light went out.
To run anywhere in the pitch black was a poor choice. One Lux had chosen to do twice before and once more. She counted on her body’s instinct to propel her down the stairs without breaking her neck, and it mostly succeeded. She sprawled onto her front at its end.
“Of all the saintforsaken hells,” she cried, clutching the candlestick to her like it mattered.
“Isn’t it hard to be broken?” said the voice. “We will never know peace.”
“I’ve never known peace anyway. Get out of my mind!”
It wasn’t true, what she said. She’d felt peace.
All-consuming. Twice in recent memory. In Shaw’s arms in the hours before she’d left Ghadra, and in a merchant wagon, a butterfly on her palm.
But if she thought of those moments, and the drastic difference to her present, she would collapse and never rise again. And she could not afford that.
She swiped out at the dark and met nothing but air. Lux continued forward on her knees, searching for any further surprises. She found nothing but flat stone. Have I finally reached the bottom? She pushed to her feet.
The voice came from behind her. “We will not last. It’s worse for us than any of the others. We’ve the darkest brilliance of all, and we will hurt everyone before we finally hurt ourselves.”
Ice burst inside her. “I won’t hurt anyone,” she hissed.
“We will hurt them terribly and thoroughly. We will again be the suffering of those we love before our end.”
A weight collapsed on top of her at those severe words. Lux staggered forward without speaking. Her throat was too tight with a forced-back sob to manage it.
It isn’t real. It isn’t real.
But why did something not real bite so hard? She felt like she bled on the inside.
Her outstretched fingers met a wall ahead. Lux ran her hands over it desperately. I must do something worthwhile. Maybe then she could shed this newfound weight.
She swept along the seams of the stacked stones. Up then down, and once she reached the edge, she went back and ran her fingers horizontal across it.
They caught.
Lux fitted her fingertips into the crack, and though they couldn’t reach all the way through, they reached something. Her middle finger snagged at a protrusion, and then the entire thing clicked, and swung in.
Blessed light doused her. Dim and far away as it was, the relief swept, palpable, in her chest. Lux spun, looking everywhere for the blighted apparition, but she found no one with her. Only the stone stairs she’d stumbled down and the small landing she stood upon. She turned again to the door.
To the tunnel beyond it.
Narrow and shadowed and comprised of black stone same as the rest of the manor; a torch shone blue in the distance. She huffed a fortifying breath. It no longer smelled of seaweed but of something cloying that she couldn’t identify.
She stepped through.
It reminded her of the tunnels beneath Ghadra. The mayor’s mansion, to be precise. All that needed to be traded was stone for brick and random screams of terror for weighted silence.
She’d not gone more than a few steps when this door, too, swung closed. It groaned rather than creaked, and when the latch clicked, Lux’s heartbeat threatened to overwhelm her ears.
She stared after it.
At the silver image depicted upon it.
A robed figure, palms out and head wrapped in a tragic crown of thorns. Another faceless saint.
She’d never stepped foot in a church in all her life, but she swore walking by their steps hadn’t felt so sinister as this. It’s only because you’re down here alone in the dark, she told herself.
Lux crept steadily away, not daring to turn until the light grew significantly brighter at her back. She glanced quickly at the torch and then to the tunnel that now forked. Both right and left were lit the same, with torches down their lengths until they curved out of sight.
She’d once come upon a fork similar to this one. That day, she’d chosen to run left because the right had frightened her. She’d learned later she’d been correct to be. A monster had lived there.
“This will not be all for nothing,” Lux murmured into the heavy quiet.
Today, she must choose the wretched right.
The wide archway at the passage’s end rose tall, steeped in dense shadow. It was a dark unmoved by the twin torches perched on either side. The sight reminded Lux of another tortuous chamber. Immediately, she did not want to go farther. Her palms slicked with sweat.
“You’re alone, you ninny. There’s no one to strap your wrists and shove a needle in your neck.”
There’s no one here to save me, either.
No Riselda.
No Shaw.
The hollow pit in her chest pulsed. She shrugged it off. There wasn’t any room for that here. Nor fear for that matter. Nevertheless, the latter made itself fit, and Lux practically shook in her boots when reading the inscription above the archway.
The Greatest Destination Is Beyond
She had no choice. No option but to push through her fright, ignore the pair of saints standing sentry, and pass into the gloom.
For being sightless, the dreaded feel of watchful eyes pressed upon her, and she cursed herself for leaving the candlestick behind at the bottom of the stairs.
If anything lurked in this dark with her—
Lux marched in before her mind could finish the thought.
If she didn’t, she’d never go.
The archway—unnervingly—spat her out at its opposite side after only a few strides. The room flared to light; a pop and fizzle marked torch after torch leaping aflame. They lit a high-ceilinged room, shining onyx, circular and domed.
Lux teetered back on her heels.
“What in the saintforsaken hell…” she breathed.
There stood the most gargantuan statue she’d ever seen.
Ivory-pale, it stretched to the ceiling, and same as its smaller counterparts, this statue was robed and crowned and entirely without features. Its arms hung straight, its hands hidden, and at its feet rose a black throne set on a dais.
She could focus on none of it any further than that. Being as a body lay before her.
Lux’s brow knit. She thought her heart slowed then halted entirely. Because this body was not lying upon a worktable or on a bed or within a box—but entombed in a grave of ice. She shivered at the frigid temperature of the chamber. Her fingers retreated beneath her arms.
Lux could feel her mind itching to work through the reasonings, but she couldn’t gather a coherent thought. Someone had made a grave of ice.
Her legs began functioning again, and she moved toward the large encasement. Now that she could see beneath it, she saw it rested on a wooden beam, polished and thick and adorned with similar faces to the pillars outside. She straightened.
“Who is this?” A thin cloud left her mouth along with the question. The suspended body was unclothed, the opaqueness of the ice obscuring all fine details. Male, she guessed.
“What even is this?” Her attention pulled to the throne, to its many spires and imposing size. She skirted around the ice grave toward it, unaware until her arrival at its side of her entire body thudding with warning.
It was the all-consuming cold.
It was the cottage in the wood.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong.
A pedestal sat next to the throne, a silver basin with a depressed lip atop it. She frowned and reached for it, because it looked recently used. Wet. Her finger brushed along its edge; she lifted it to inspect what came away.
Nothing.
Her lips parted. She craned her neck, staring up and up.
The saint didn’t watch her back. If the sculptor had gifted it eyes, it would have stared instead at the man frozen in time.
At the entrance too. Lux scanned the curved walls surrounding her, and realized there were recesses in them.
Rectangular cutouts—and inside were familiar shapes resting in black shrouds.
Some were empty.
Most were not.
Lux stepped down from the dais. She stalked toward the first recess she could reach and peeled the shroud back.
Hollowed eye sockets in a skeletal face stared back at her. She pulled it farther, until a breastbone with a silver ribbon and a cross-shaped pendant flashed in the torchlight.
Collectors?
Had she actually found the resting place of the morning room’s portraits?
Contrary to what her prior job might have indicated, Lux didn’t wish to disturb the dead. She dragged the shroud back into place and stepped away. “A throne overlooking a room of corpses,” she whispered and tucked her thumb between her teeth.
And one frozen body.
It was the strangest thing seeing a person buried in ice. She could pick out the faint, pallid line of leg and arm, and the barest profile. Lux crept forward and then crouched to better view the angles. A familiarity niggled at her. Her hand lifted.
“Saints above. Could you be Alixsander the Overlord?” she wondered, settling her fingertips on the coffin.
The cold shocked her straight through. Lux hissed at the burn. She jerked her fingers back only for it not to work on one. The pad of her thumb remained stuck fast. Lux gritted her teeth. She pulled again and yelped. It wouldn’t release her.
“Devil’s tits,” she ground out. “You’re the biggest idiot!”
Lux stilled on her next breath.
Beyond the coffin—
The sound of something being dragged. Her insides matched her outsides as everything within her froze. No. No!
She yanked again on her finger and a single tear slipped down her cheek from the pain. Please don’t come around. Please stay on that side. Lux curled in on herself, and because she could see nothing, she listened as hard as she could.
She’d experience with the sound of a dragging body. Whatever was being hauled into the chamber was not that. It sounded heavy, wooden maybe, and whoever had been made in charge of it breathed like a bellows.
Lux wished she could do the same.
She kept her breathing minimal, and then stopped entirely when the dragging ceased.
“Open the lid,” said a voice, harshly familiar. “Now lift him together. Do not drop him. Yes, place him there.”
No muttering. No questions. Only direction. And heavy breaths.
Lux slapped a hand over her mouth when a different hand fell overtop the ice grave. She huffed away her startled yelp, her eyes wide as saucers. The limp limb was brown and uncovered. Snaking black veins lined the length. It could have been Mistress Lefroy’s in death if the skin were powder white.
Poison, Lux thought as the hand settled in line with her vision. But why were they stacking a poisoned body above a frozen one? Was this standard process in their entombing?
In that moment, she realized to whom the voice in the room belonged. Silas—the collector she’d followed since Loxlen—had arrived at last. With a new body in tow.
“Prepare the basin.”
Lux glanced quickly to the pedestal at her back in a panic.
She hauled again at her finger and gritted her teeth at the sharp pain.
She could hear footsteps coming around the left side of the coffin.
If she were caught here, what would happen?
There were too many possibilities to consider, and she already didn’t like things as they were now.
Lux bared her teeth—and ripped her finger away.
Her mouth gaped in a silent scream before she stuck the damaged pad of her thumb inside it.
She scurried around the opposite end just as boots and a black robe appeared in her periphery.
Blood pooled in her mouth; she tried not to gag.
Instead, she pressed her tongue to the wound and lamented the sting.
Around the coffin sat the source of the noise.
A wooden contraption. With two wheels, two handles, and a closed lid carved with another saint and words she couldn’t spare the time to read.
She crouched beside it until she could be sure the collectors’ backs were to her.
Except—they weren’t all collectors. She’d guessed wrong.
Only one was. The other two were dressed in Mothlock attendants’ garb.
The body atop the ice was a strange sight.
The opposite hand dangled on this side too.
They’d allowed him his undergarments and nothing else, and she wondered how long he’d been dead.
Beyond rigor mortis and so beyond her services for certain.
On the dais the attendants were busy preparing the basin in whatever way Silas required.
Lux heard the plink of something against it.
She glanced again at the chamber’s entrance. Had it always been so far away?
Would she make it?
She began to edge backward.
“Sweep the room for rodents. The torches were on when we arrived. Kill any you find and keep them for your dinner. Then return the cart to Lord Artemis.”
Lux’s muscles seized. Devil take me… Silas came around the coffin.
She pressed herself against the cart, but aside from rapping on it in passing, he continued out of the room without a backward glance.
Lux scanned the chamber for any new ideas but found none.
When the attendants stepped from the dais, she used her last seconds of freedom to do the only thing she could think of.
She cracked the lid of the cart and climbed inside.